personal narratives . poems . prose

American Dream

This is the city where homeless sleep on the benches right across from the golf course. And we roll up the windows of our SUVs and stare blindly ahead.
If
Where we call for freedom. Freedom to trample other people’s dreams without even realizing it. Freedom to earn enough money to do whatever we choose forgetting too quickly those we leave behind to spin their wheels in cycles of poverty circling down the toilet bowl.
From these cracked concrete I was somehow birthed. Seeping up like morning steam and little pale green weeds, between the cracks of a broken society that doesn’t know how to relate to each other even though they are living side by side. From an upper class mom and a working class dad and me in between playing in the rainbows left floating in the brown water on muddy pools in the flooded streets. Little iridescent whispers left Seeping up from the stains in the road left by pickups left idling too long in the afternoon traffic in the heat.

I hate that people reserve the right to squint their eyes at me or call out “konichiwa” in the streets or act all surprised eyed when I speak to them in the diction of my Western school books. Because I don’t like the feeling of my skin, there’s nothing that resonates with it. I want to become the white culture I was brought up in. My friends, my classmates, my neighborhood, white white white. But at the same time I don’t resonate with them. I don’t like their artificial small talk or extreme consumerism and I don’t do margaritas, girls wine nights, or watch the same movies. I am them. I am not them. Perhaps the hardest thing is that weird way that I am bound to my family even when I do t agree with them.its some sort of tacit bond that ties me tightly despite the desperate hacks of logic I throw at it, despite the fires of emotion I try to burn it down with.